Tim Jollymore at The Reader's Loft

Friday, July 75:30 PM at The Reader's Loft

Lake Stories and Other Tales

Comic, heartfelt, and mysterious, these stories charm the reader with good humor, affection for their natural settings, and the gentle, persistent seeking for a lasting place in the daily world of common folk.

Some tales cast moonlight over the solitary in us all who wander at dusk. Others haunt us with loss and evoke a certain sense of autumn, likely to press sighs from an ache in our breath. Still others fill us with the pride in a true hero.

The humorous among these engender wistful smiles, occasional smirks, and outright chuckles punctuated by a shaking of the cynical head.

In the tradition of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the narratives turn their gaze to our behavior, leading us to find ourselves outdoors rather than searching within. The words sometime cut sharply our venal selves, other times lead us to reach a hand over our hearts.

These stories, unified by Jollymore's "wolf poems," invite readers to join in a happy, pointed, and gentle cosmic dance, hand in paw with the wolves doing the "chill-rhumba, Borealis."

Tim Jollymore grew up next to the swamps, forests, and Indian reservations of northern Minnesota, the setting of his first novel. He spent his working life as a tree planter, pulp peeler, local historian, traveling salesman, and corporate manager. After migrating to California, he pursued residential design, contracting, and the teaching of English. Jollymore earned his master's degree in literature at the University of Minnesota. He has also studied architecture and education. Since leaving the teaching of writing and American literature in 2011, he has devoted his time to fiction and drama, writing a five-act play, completing three novels and numerous short stories, reviews, essays. He posts to his review blog, www.Jollymore.wordpress.com, frequently and has written several travel blogs. During summer, he camps across the western states to visit extended family in northern Minnesota. Otherwise, he writes in Oakland, California and shares free time with his sleepyhead, artist companion, Carol. He lives in northern California nearby his grown children, one of whom writes. When he can, Jollymore yells and screams along with his Viking grandson. Jollymore's fiction explores struggles of identity and loss in American society from the viewpoint of the under and working classes. Though these contests-sometimes mysterious and often fierce- play out in spare, natural settings and every day, domestic life, they are marked by unusual, compelling events.